The BBC and ME: A LOVE-HATE THING Part I

It’s been a tumultuous year for the BBC, with the autumn debacle surrounding the Corporation’s role in revelations about the child abuse practised by its long-time employee Jimmy Savile costing the new Director-General his job after fewer than eight weeks in post. I would hardly call it, with veteran World Affairs editor John Simpson, “the worst crisis that I can remember in my nearly fifty years at the BBC” – perhaps my memory is sharper than Simpson’s – but it has certainly not been an edifying spectacle.

The BBC has always been an unwieldy institution, even when it was considerably more collegiate and streamlined than it is now. Corporation lifers (of whom there are still many more than in most enterprises, even though it can never again be depended upon as a secure haven by those to whom the mores are palatable) are apt to insist (a verb much loved by BBC news scriptwriters) that “the Beeb” is still broadly “trusted” by the public and always has been. I’m not so sure. Equally, my own dealings with the BBC have often been complicated and thwarted by manoeuvrings that seem peculiar to intensely bureaucratic ivory towers.

John Simpson at the outset of his BBC career

The first television broadcast I ever saw was the BBC’s coverage of the coronation of HM Queen Elizabeth II on June 2nd 1953. Along with a majority of British households (56 percent of the population, plus another 12 million following it on the wireless), we joined in the very first exercise in mass media communication in Britain. If you include the audiences for relays and recordings shown in other countries, the total viewing audience topped 277 million. The coverage cost the BBC £44,000.

Like so many others, we had to up sticks for the duration and squeeze into the living room of a neighbour’s house to gaze at that tiny black and white picture on the large and cumbersome but elegant wooden set. It was television that fixed the image for us: “Miss Jones: What colour was the Queen’s coach? – Michael: Grey, Miss” [The Golden Pathway Annual by John Harding and John Burrows].

My Dad was one of the million householders who bought a set in the year following the coronation. And our lives changed forever. The pattern of viewing began to dictate family life. I especially was entranced by this lively source of information, education and entertainment available (after a delay while it warmed up) at the touch of a button. The wireless could always be playing while you did other things, but the goggle-box demanded your full attention (at least, we thought so).

Until 1955, there was only the BBC’s single channel to watch and its hours were very restricted. ‘Closedown’ (when the national anthem was played and some viewers dutifully got to their feet) came early enough to allow even the petit bourgeoisie to have a glance at the evening paper before turning in. A smattering of items for children in the late afternoon was followed by a suspension of transmission between 6.00 and 7.00pm, to allow parents to pack them off to bed or to homework; this period became known as “the toddlers’ truce”. With such limited hours, it was feasible to watch everything broadcast. In our house, we often did.

Apologists for ITV are wont to claim that the BBC was staid and safe until the commercial channel gave it competition. The press had dubbed the BBC ‘Auntie’ but many newspaper owners nursed hopes of involvement in ITV franchises; they were far from disinterested. My Dad, himself a businessman, distrusted the commercial interests and “wouldn’t have ITV in the house” till he relented in 1961.

Joan Miller, the so-called switchboard girl, on Picture Parade

BBC producers established the conventions that subsequent services emulated and that still make up the major genres of the medium: one-off and serial drama, variety, sketch comedy, sitcom, panel games, quiz shows, children’s programmes, documentary, current affairs, news, magazine programmes, relays of outside events and what Homer Simpson would call “edumacation” programmes. While most of these forms derived from television services elsewhere (especially the States), from wireless and from entertainment sources of other kinds, little of substance has been added since.

Pre-ITV, the BBC produced the first magazine programme, Picture Page; Come Dancing; Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass serials and his dramatization of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; The Good Old Days; Sportsview; David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest; Watch with Mother; Panorama; Mr Pastry; Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?; the first British serial to embrace soap-opera values (The Grove Family); regular news bulletins and the basis for a network of schools programming. ITV introduced two ingredients of which the BBC knew nothing: advertising and showbiz. The impresarios who owned the companies that built ITV – the Bernsteins, the Grades, the Rank Organization, Associated British Pictures – had long experience of and wide links with the native film industry, the variety circuit, the popular press and myriad talent agencies. ITV aimed for and achieved a populist stance that the BBC felt (often with justice) was vulgar and down-market. Even its news service, ITN, had a more sensationalist approach than BBC News.

Over the years, the populist approach has utterly routed the thoughtful approach. By the 1970s, media analyst Anthony Smith was able to note that BBC1 and ITV were “moving towards a point of convergence”. Since then, the rush away from serious programming has accelerated. What was once thought perfectly accessible on BBC1 began to be shunted to BBC2 but now that channel is just as down-market. What the biz calls ‘quality’ programmes are found on BBC4, but in recent times that channel too has lowered its sights. Its bill of fare tonight – The Bridges That Built London; … Sings Disney Songs!; The Best of Kenny Everett’s Television Shows; Numb: Simon Amstell Live at the BBC; More Old Jews Telling Jokes; The Art of Tommy Cooper; How the Brits Rocked America; Sounds of the 70s – would have readily been scheduled on BBC1 thirty years ago.

Tommy Cooper, present-day BBC4 fare

That the media generally have dumbed down is beyond dispute. I never trust surveys but when their findings agree with one’s own view … and it so happens that an ICM poll in 2004 did find that of those questioned “54 percent agreed the BBC had ‘dumbed down’ or lowered quality”. I have no way of knowing how credible or properly worded the survey was, but in the end it matters little what proportion of people think that the BBC and other mediums of news and diversion have dumbed down. I know they have.

I turned 13 in 1960 and my teens happily coincided with what is unarguably remembered as the Golden Age of British television. I became particularly drawn to BBC1’s contemporary drama strand, The Wednesday Play, which ran from 1964 to 1970. My father’s resistance to ITV meant that I only discovered ABC Television’s Armchair Theatre in retrospect. This slot, which began in 1956, was in every way the forerunner of The Wednesday Play – Harold Pinter was among the playwrights to cut their teeth on it – and, in setting up its rival, the BBC even poached the presiding genius of ITV drama, Sydney Newman, to be its Head of Plays. Newman’s lethal combination of progressiveness, fearlessness, non-conformity and showbiz instincts ensured that the BBC’s contemporary drama was never out of the headlines.

I was at university and tinkering with a teleplay of my own when the BBC announced a play-writing competition open only to college students. Over the Easter vac, I settled seriously to the task and got my entry off just inside the deadline. By the summer, I had forgotten about it, so the letter telling me that my play had won the competition was a complete surprise. At a small and – as I was to discover – a very BBC ceremony in the Bridge Lounge at Television Centre, I was presented with a head-spinningly large cheque for £500 by the Head of Drama, Gerald Savory, attended by my proud parents. I don’t think either of them had actually read the play – certainly my father hadn’t – so they may not have been as braced for the ensuing events as they might have been.

The two runners-up were also at the ceremony, Catherine Itzin and Andrew Dickson. Both went on to do intriguing things. Itzin became a highly respected theatre academic and a formidable campaigner against pornography. Dickson had a varied career in journalism and became the lover of BBC drama producer Irene Shubik. Both died much too young.

The charismatic Sydney Newman

My play was called Circle Line. I actually entitled it Circle/Line which I fancied made it sound like the name of a modernist painting but the producer and script editor who subsequently put it into production briskly scotched that notion. Though (as regular readers of this blog will testify) I have a gift for nicely judged titles, almost nothing by me of substance that has been set before the public has been allowed out under my chosen title.

My protagonist was, like me, a London University student of philosophy. He was, in Peter Fiddick’s succinct assessment in his smart review for The Guardian, “a moral blank-sheet”. In the play’s overarching conceit, he viewed life as “like travelling round the Circle Line”. In a climactic scene, the Circle Line passengers panic when the train is stalled in a tunnel. My hero watches them dispassionately. Then the train restarts and they settle down. As an image of modern life, it was … well, serviceable.

The play was an active project within a few weeks of its prize: production turnaround was much faster then than now. Despite my inexperience, I was given full access to every stage of the process and even allowed by the director to choose the actor I favoured for the lead over his preferred candidate. There was some shooting on the underground for telecine drop-ins. One shot through the opening doors was ruined by a London Transport official standing in mid-shot barking “not this train”. But it was thrilling to be part of a location movie shoot in the city. The director even cut a shot of me into the final edit, my Hitchcock moment.

A lot of drama was still made with multiple cameras in the studio and that was how mine was recorded in the two days before Christmas in 1969. My mother and I sat in the back of the gallery and watched the whole process. Occasionally I was consulted – not, I felt, merely for form’s sake. However, at one point a note came from Gerald Savory who was in a viewing room somewhere above the studio. He couldn’t allow one of my more literary jokes.

My student hero, grumbling about some aspect of the service in a café, was to utter: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a Wimpy and chips” (if this quip leaves you struggling, I suggest you put “this is the way the world ends” in Google Search and “Wimpy” in Wikipedia). Gerald declared that we couldn’t use the word Wimpy, both because of the BBC’s barring of brand names and because it might be defamatory. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why this problem had been overlooked until the moment of recording. But, to my intense chagrin, the actor had to go with “not with a bang but with a cheese omelette” which, those of you who now have the joke under your belts will concur, lacks something by comparison.

Gerald Savory, long before the days when I knew him

It was more than a year before the recording was actually broadcast. Higher up in the management structure, there were concerns about the play’s content. Again it seemed to me that the proper time for these concerns was much earlier in the process. But I had the misfortune to coincide with a turning of the tide. Sir Hugh Greene, the most progressive and imaginative DG the BBC has ever had, was eased out of office in 1969 by the new Chairman of the BBC Board, Lord Hill. His replacement, Charles Curran, was a conservative placeman. The Golden Age was over.

In the 1970s, there was a long, brutal struggle over what writers and producers called ‘censorship’ and what managers called ‘editorial control’, fought in the corridors of television companies, especially the BBC. Many of the battles were about language. In Circle Line, some language detail was conceded by Savory, provided a brief discussion about masturbation was removed. On the other hand, a scene depicting my student hero post-coitally in bed with a 14 year-old boy was shown intact and, on that count alone, the play wouldn’t get accepted for production now, certainly not as written.

The language battles were often as trivial as that once described by Peter Cook, in which you would be, as it were, trading three ‘bloodies’ for a ‘shit’. The agent whom I had acquired, Clive Goodwin, argued that nobody who watched a Wednesday Play had cause to complain if she found it ruffled her sensibility. But if Cilla Black swept in at the top of her variety show and cried “Hello, you fuckers”, that would be an outrage. It was, I thought, a seductive if also reductive example. The point – that context is all – was pertinent, however. Now, of course, expletives that would embarrass a navvy are routinely included in the most humdrum, mainstream programmes, provided a warning about “strong” language has preceded the broadcast.

By the time that Circle Line was transmitted, The Wednesday Play had been axed. The rationale was that the new strand title, Play for Today, allowed greater transmission flexibility. But we one-off drama aficionados sensed that the writing was on the wall. Even though the leading teleplaywrights – Dennis Potter, David Mercer, Alun Owen, John Hopkins, Julia Jones, Jim Allen, Trevor Griffiths – were now taken as seriously as their equivalents in the theatre, the inevitable result of the increasing competitiveness of scheduling was that one-off programmes could not justify their comparatively high budgets.

After Circle Line, which was pretty well received, the BBC turned down the next eight plays that I wrote. Eight! I’d like to be able to say that this was a learning experience but the standard rejection letter that I received vouchsafed no more explication than the stock line “it’s not for us”.

Graeme McDonald during his uneventful spell as BBC2 Controller; he later nominally ran Prince Edward's production company Argent while drinking himself to death

After eighteen months, I was offered a consolation prize, a contract as a trainee script editor. The first three months of this were the best. I was sent on attachment to the Script Unit, which was based in the East Tower on the Television Centre site (the Drama Department was on the fifth floor of the main block, “the doughnut”). The legendary producer Tony Garnett also kept his office in the East Tower because, as he told me, it removed the temptation to get embroiled in the politics of the Drama Department. He also gave me some wise advice: "if you have to see a member of the management, always make the appointment for after half past five. Then they'll think you're working terrifically hard and there's a good chance you'll be offered a drink". Garnett was definitely one of the Corporation's survivors.

The Script Unit was staffed within and served from without by a bunch of delightful, generous people. Its function was to assess all the unsolicited scripts that poured into the BBC and to reply to them, often in remarkable detail. Those submitting their scribblings mostly had little appreciation of this extraordinary free tuition; indeed, some would argue fiercely with the findings. But all submissions were read, either by the in-house assessors like me or by wise old owls outside to whom scripts were farmed out. Of course it was a very useful exercise for me too. I learned a lot about how to read a script – a considerable skill now rarely encountered in the business – and how to structure and project material. Needless to add, the unit was closed down before the decade was out.

After that, I was attached to Graeme McDonald and Ann Scott, respectively producer and script editor of Circle Line, for the rest of my contract. This was a frustrating experience. The script editor’s function – nominally to look after the writer’s interests throughout the production – is in practice a nebulous job, wholly dependent on the relationship with the producer, whose strengths the script editor should ideally complement. Graeme and Ann had a well-established modus operandi that left little for me to do but pad around after them, making more or less unhelpful suggestions.

Moreover, they were not cut from the same generous cloth as Robin Wade and Betty Willingale in the Script Unit. There was an outsize character with whom I would sometimes have a lunchtime drink in the BBC Club. Derek Ingrey was small and dynamic, affecting an Aristide Bruant fedora and red scarf (long before those were a cliché) and expressing forthright opinions on everything. Bizarrely he was the script editor on Dixon of Dock Green (on the surface at least, a most unlikely piece of casting) and allegedly he would spend the autumn, winter and spring tending to Ted Willis’s workaday scripts and the summer in France having outrageous affairs with local schoolgirls. Anyway, Derek asked me one day how I was getting on with Graeme and Ann. He caught my moment of hesitation and observed shrewdly: “yes … costive, aren’t they”. I agreed for form’s sake and, having looked up the word later, agreed whole-heartedly.

David Rose, a lovely man, later C4's first drama controller

At the end of my contract, Cedric Messina (“the African queen” as one or two unkind souls called him) wanted me to become his script editor on Play of the Month, the slot for splashy production of theatre plays, typically Shakespeare, Shaw or Chekhov. I had got to know Cedric and liked him, had been to the house – very grand, as was everything of Cedric’s – and met his unexpected wife and even more unexpected tiny, ringleted daughter, had made some suggestions for the strand that had intrigued him: Morecambe and Wise in Waiting for Godot, Olivier in a role he had yet to conquer, Lear (which he famously did some years later for Granada). But Chris Morahan, the Head of Plays, declared that Cedric needed a mature script editor (he got Alan Shallcross) and that I ought to go off and run a theatre. “Oh yes,” I thought, “I’ll just nip into the Royal Court and stage a coup”.

It was five years before I returned to the BBC. At the time, I was writing television previews and a news column for The Observer, sharing a page with Clive James. Just before Christmas, I went up to Birmingham to attend the launch of Pebble Mill’s contribution to network drama which regularly launched the new year. After the main presentation and a buffet lunch, I sat down with a cassette of a complete play (I was always a diligent previewer). Throughout, I kept receiving messages that I must call in to the office of the Head of English Regions Drama, David Rose, before I left.

When I finally got to David’s office, it was packed with very noisy and drunken writers and directors. David, himself well away, hauled me into his inner sanctum and asked if I was ready to come back into television. This was very unexpected. He said he had a producing job that he hoped I would like to do and that we should have lunch in the new year. And in the new year I will continue the story.

BULLETS and BALLOTS

What is to be done about gun control in the United States? Given that he will never again put himself up for office, Barack Obama cannot argue that the electorate prevents him from enacting new legislation – not this far from the mid-term elections at any rate. It is suggested that the “fiscal cliff” stand-off with the Republican-controlled Congress will absorb all his negotiating room, but gun control ought not to be a party issue, not if presented smartly.

Nobody suggests that it will be easy. The Second Amendment to the US Constitution declares that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. This clause was inserted 121 years ago last Saturday. The US was a very different place at the beginning of the 1790s when the drive west was getting under way. Over the following thirty years, the population of the country nearly tripled and the proportion living to the west of the Appalachians grew from five percent to twenty-five percent. This was the period when the native American was being systematically driven from his ancestral lands. So the right to bear arms was an unsurprising product of the wild frontier.

An emotional Obama speaks about the massacre

Is such a right necessary now? American lawlessness is often proclaimed as one of the nation’s greatest problems. Of course, the unfettered proliferation of deadly weapons itself promotes that lawlessness. For us in Britain, where firearms are much more often seen on the telly than (as it were) in the flesh, travelling in many parts of the world comes as a culture shock, especially in the matter of packing heat. Whether it is police being armed at so many European borders or teenaged soldiers walking the streets and riding the buses toting their TAR-21s in middle-eastern countries or those dinky little signs in suburban American front gardens that warn “armed response”, the mild-mannered Brits might be forgiven for feeling a touch of paranoia when far from home.

In the last five years, two judgments by the US Supreme Court have ratified the Second Amendment, underlining the individual’s right to possess a firearm for the purpose of protecting his property. Some restrictions have lapsed in recent years and polling suggests that support for gun control has waned at the same time, perhaps related to the perceived threat of terrorism.

But is there really anything remotely sensible to be said against rescinding the Second Amendment? I found a site (also styling itself Common Sense) that offers four arguments against gun control, largely attempting to defeat statistical points. Well, I too would rather eschew statistics and instead deploy reason. This site’s arguments are:

1: Thugs ignore gun laws.
2: Thugs prefer unarmed victims and avoid potentially armed citizens.
3: Crime is deviant behaviour.
4: Quotes the Second Amendment as “the Trump Card”.

This last is not an argument at all and cannot be engaged. The so-called “Colonel” who writes the blog (in actuality a children’s illustrator named Mary Dall) calls the Amendment “absolute, unambiguous and supersedes all arguments”. Well, it isn’t and it doesn’t. As for the first three arguments, the real debate is only marginally about crime. Rather, the discussion is about access. Most Americans seem quite convinced by the proposal that Iran having nuclear capacity is not a good idea. But it is no more of a good idea for American individuals even less stable than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to have access to deadly weapons.

Lanza: a chilling augury

The pro-gun lobby always puts forward the old saw that “it isn’t guns that kill people, it’s people that kill people”. I guess it’s not food that feeds people, it’s people that feed people. But you can bet that people with food are more adept at feeding people than people without food. Now make the analogy with guns. Adam Lanza, the Newtown, Connecticut killer, would have achieved many fewer casualties if he had only been able to throttle his victims. Even with a kitchen knife, he couldn’t have killed fleeing children, at least not without risking the loss of his weapon. The guns gave him the capacity to slay twenty-seven. Perhaps if he had had a missile, he could have taken out the whole school from his bedroom window.

Of course criminals will still get their hands on guns. That happens in Britain too. The difference is that practically all of the 0.1-per-1,000 of the UK population who are killed by guns are killed by criminals, whereas a substantial majority of the 3-per-1,000 Americans who die by guns do so in accidental shootings, domestic disputes or rampages by the unhinged. That is the critical difference that derives from easy access to guns.

Lanza's weapon of choice: the Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle

Moreover, tightening the regulations that govern the licensing of weapons will not make sufficient difference. As we saw in the harrowing incident at Newtown, the mass murderer helped himself to the weapons registered to his mother, who then became his first victim. Indeed, she had taught him to shoot. It might be instructive to learn what proportion of Americans is slain by their own guns.

A lot of Americans – some women as well as men – like to indulge the fantasy of being some dauntless combination of Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill. This fantasy is clung to as an inalienable right and, in consequence, the cold dead hand of Charlton Heston still grips the American legislature. Well, neighbourhood law-enforcement is a profession and a sophisticated one with a good many controls and regulations. It is not the business of amateurs. And hunting ought to be restricted too, both for the sake of the survival of America’s dwindling wildlife and to prevent the kind of accident that so besmirched the otherwise blemishless reputation of former Vice-President Dick Cheney.

The Connecticut mansion where Lanza killed his mother

It is blindingly obvious – to rational people if not to the National Rifle Association – that fewer guns in private hands will result in fewer deaths by gunshot. Some now argue that the Newtown children might have survived if their teachers had gone to school armed. That presupposes such a lot of elements cohering – that the teachers happened to have their weapons at the ready when Lanza shot his way into the school, that at least one of them would have had no compunction about shooting him in cold blood, that no child or teacher would have been hurt in crossfire, that no kind of a gun battle would have developed, that no curious child was ever able to get their hands on a weapon, that no accident would ever occur in the storing or maintaining of the school’s arsenal, that the school’s security was always so good that it would be impossible that someone wanting to grab a cache of guns could break in.

The answer is not to arm the school but to disarm the Lanza household. Why is this so difficult to grasp? Why are men with small penises allowed to hold sway over rational thought because of their desire to look big with a deadly weapon to hand? People have to be prepared to surrender their pleasures (killing defenceless birds and animals) and their comforts (armed response) for the greater good. And to those who still argue for unfettered gun possession, the best response is simply to begin the litany of names of the children who died at Lanza’s hands. And then those of the teachers. And then those who died at Northern Illinois University, at Virginia Tech, at Nickel Mines Amish School, at Red Lake Senior High, at Columbine …

A DUTY to ONE’s COUNTRY

On the day that the Chancellor was delivering his admission of failure (sorry, autumn statement), I fell to thinking about the tax system (my internet connection was down for a couple of days so this posting has been delayed). We’re frequently told that it is too complicated and that it needs simplifying. Equally, its complexity appears to be such as to defeat attempts to simplify it. This is a mere fig-leaf for inaction. Successive governments of all inclinations have neglected to tackle either the convolutions that allow the astute and the unscrupulous to avoid paying their dues or the resultant chasm between rich and poor, a chasm that has continued to widen, despite the presence of supposedly egalitarian ministers throughout a majority of the past fifty years.

Chancellor Osborne

What can be done? I propose that some new principles activate taxation policy. The first is to make it an overarching truism that taxation is a contribution rather than a penalty. We all pay lip-service to the famous dictum in John F Kennedy’s inauguration address more than fifty years ago: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”. Yet we generally resent paying our dues, talk in terms of “the burden of taxation”, even of “state grabs”, and have no compunction about paying the window-cleaner or the decorator in cash so that we avoid VAT and he avoids tax altogether.

Tory Chancellors generally aim to cut taxation because they subscribe to a liberal fiscal policy of reducing public spending and “giving back” to the electorate or rather, as we anti-Tories call them, to “their friends in the city”. But this stance implicitly confirms the notion that tax is an imposition. Rather, government needs to engineer a change of mindset so that the duty on goods and transactions is seen as that other kind of duty, a civic duty. The fine distinction between tax evasion and tax avoidance needs to be eradicated. Not paying one’s dues is too often seen as a legitimate sport – and certainly less culpable than taking unmerited benefits (which robs the country of far less). But avoiding/evading tax needs to be re-categorised as what it really is: anti-social behaviour, deception and indeed theft.

Old Rupe

Then the thrust of tax should be firmly fixed onto income and purchasing. These are clearly identifiable areas of accounting where deception is most easily detected. Let income tax, from whatever source, be calculated on a straightforward sliding scale. This can allow government to manipulate the wider economy to ensure that wealth really is redistributed and the gap between rich and poor reduced. I propose that personal taxation be as rigorous and simple as possible. If the respective amounts that various classes and strata of citizens receive and hold can be controlled by tax, there is no need to overlay on that system a cat’s cradle of ifs and buts that is complicated and susceptible to exploitation. Let us abolish the tax loop-hole once and for all.

If the bulk of tax is taken based upon an individual’s income, the great majority of other occasions for imposing duty may be done away with. Taxes on business, on enterprise, on firms and on organisations could be cut to a minimum. By the same token, business deductions should be done away with too. If tax on enterprise is low, there is no argument for or need for outgoings to be set against tax. Businesses will have to cover their expenditure in the charges that they make to others or in the rates of pay with which they reward themselves and their people.

Young Rothers

But if trading outfits are permitted to keep the great majority of their income and profit and only see taxation begin to kick in when that income and those profits are disbursed to share-holders, directors, pension-holders, employees and those with whom they make trades, there ought to be more incentive to plough profits back into the business. The traditional blurring between business expenditure and capital expenditure would no longer bedevil tax claims.

Taxation on corporate profit (capital gains) could be abandoned, encouraging business to invest. Tax on spend – what used to be called purchase tax and is now VAT – could be more carefully targeted, especially to help those for whom certain items like domestic utilities, eating out, petrol and clothing make up a high proportion of costs. The black economy aside, taxes associated with purchasing do not lend themselves so readily to corrupt practices.

Under my taxation system, it would be the level of personal income that would be most closely scrutinised by HMRC. No individual would be able to pass himself off as a business as many have profitably done to date, most notoriously the comedian Jimmy Carr.

Barclay bros

Nor would individuals be able to avoid their dues by living abroad. The press barons have never been slow to avoid paying their dues. US citizen Rupert Murdoch contributes no tax to the British government and employs an army of accountants to minimise doing so elsewhere. Lord Rothermere, owner of The Daily Mail, contrives to live in tax exile even though his main residence is in Wiltshire, a remarkable piece of juggling (his newspapers are registered in Bermuda and the wealth he inherited from his father was not subject to British penalties because Rothermere Sr lived under the rather less draconian tax regime in force in Paris). Performing the onerous task of owning The Daily Telegraph from their tax haven in Monaco, the multi-millionaire Barclay Brothers must have laughed to scorn the fainthearted level of graft in the Westminster village that was so comprehensively uncovered by their organ. Moat-cleaning indeed! Why not acquire a Channel Island? That’s a vastly more cost-effective scam.

The issue of “non doms” did exercise politicians and commentators on all sides for a while in the century’s first decade, but to no lasting purpose. The question of whether someone who lives abroad for tax purposes should enjoy status privileges in Britain is, to my mind, an irrelevant and misleading question. Where someone designates her or his principal residence is far too exploitable a matter. Income should be taxed not on the basis of where the earner lives but where the income is earned. Better yet, follow the practice of the IRS in the United States: tax without reference to either the location of the earner’s domicile or the country of the income’s origin. To avoid taxation, Americans have to renounce their US citizenship altogether and even after that their US income is taxed on the same basis as that of a guest worker. You don’t hear of US billionaires living as tax exiles. And if rich Americans can tolerate such a system, Brits sure as hell can too.

P Green

No doubt there would be a degree of departure from these shores among those unwilling to submit to contributing an appropriate proportion of their wealth to public provision. Such people merit a one-word response: “Goodbye”. If, to continue owning several mansions and a private jet, they are obliged to be based in a country where, beyond their gated communities, they are surrounded by abject poverty, that is for their consciences to reconcile. But it is a self-serving myth that our industries cannot survive without greedy, grasping individuals. They can and will survive (the BBC managed to go on after Jonathan Ross, for instance) because there will always be people who are thoughtful as well as talented, who want work that is stimulating first and lucrative only as may be, and who will choose to stay in a decent society that diligently cares for all its members.

Tax-dodging needs to be much more heavily penalised. There is no sensible argument for sending such crooks to jail. The penalties that hurt are financial ones. Let any individual found to have avoided taxation be fined five times the amount avoided. And let organisations, companies and corporations pay twenty times the tax shortfall. Such penalties ought to have a deterrent effect. The present argument about tax avoidance that is immoral but not illegal is an absurdity. If the tax laws cannot be streamlined so that any tax bill that is morally justified is simultaneously obligatory, the authorities have only themselves to blame for their failings.

Jumping Mick Flash

Finally, there is the black economy. Many who rail against the bestowing of (for instance) a knighthood on Philip Green or Mick Jagger for services to tax avoidance do not turn a hair at under-the-counter transactions of their own. Well, you may ask, how can one track down the black economy? The task can certainly begin. The Television Licensing Authority notoriously comes calling on householders who do not own a television licence on the argument that not all of these people can possibly be getting by without a television. Something similar could be undertaken to confront those who do not register on HMRC’s records. Some of those accumulating cash-in-hand income while registered for benefits would certainly be caught that way. Maybe HMRC might also work fruitfully in tandem with the Ministry for Work and Pensions to identify those many millions who are entitled to receive state benefits and credits but, usually out of ignorance, do not receive them.

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On the subject of Sir Mick Jagger, the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Stones reminds of the two gigs of theirs that I attended in my youth. The big megastar one was at Earls Court as part of their European tour in May 1976. But I more fondly recall the rougher band that I saw – still including Brian Jones – at Kettering Granada in January 1964, when they closed the first half of a bill topped by the Ronettes. Now that was real rock’n’roll history.

MY PLAN for PEACE

In the October presidential debates, very little was said by either the thoughtful, progressive candidate or the opportunist, reactionary candidate about the world. The great majority of the arguments they framed referred wholly to the internal politics of the United States. For sure, there were passing references to foreign affairs and to the various kinds of tumult and change in Libya, Syria and other lands; to demonstrate the width if not the depth of his homework, Mitt Romney even name-checked Mali. But these references were not in any important way statesmanlike. What they foregrounded was what is considered the ne plus ultra of political dialogue in the US: the American interest.

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, America has proudly proclaimed itself the world’s only ‘superpower’. If this is a matter of pride in power, why are successive US administrations so insecure in their super status? Why do they behave as the schoolyard bully, cuffing the uppity kids, taking the collectables off the milquetoasts and insisting on going straight to the head of the line when the tuck shop opens? In a manner no different from that of the despised George W Bush, Barack Obama tells his ‘fellow Americans’ and indeed the rest of the world that he puts American interests above everything else.

Obama – street-fighting man?

Wouldn’t it be more useful, more democratic, more libertarian, more confident, more Christian to be the gentle giant, putting the interests of the whole planet above everything else? Isn’t it actually in the American interest for the whole planet to be peaceful and prosperous? Obama began his first term by sounding a relatively conciliatory note towards Iran, whose regime he and most other western leaders believe is bent on developing nuclear weapons. But Obama never followed up on this tone. Economic sanctions have caused and continue to cause great hardship among the populace of Iran. But if American diplomats have ever sat down with their Iranian equivalents to talk out some settlement of this mutual suspicion and hostility, no such talks have been made public.

Now the US grows daily more suspicious of China. Romney and the Republicans – and not only people on the right – urge Obama to “stand up to” the Chinese. What does it mean? It suits everyone not to spell it out. And it means they don’t have to invest long hours in subtle, intricate diplomacy. But I expect the Chinese would like to live in peace and prosperity just as much as the Americans would. What seems to me to be obvious (though it is never said by politicians) is that the advantage of one nation does not automatically exclude some advantage for another. There are alternatives to ruthless competition just as there are alternatives to mutually assured destruction.

Cameron – pugilist?

Not that every other nation is any different. In his fractious dealings with both his own MPs and his opposite numbers in the European governments, David Cameron speaks of very little other than “the British interest”. Across the EU, the Germans, Greeks, French, Italians and Spanish are locked in mutual distrust that one or all of the others will seek to smuggle past them a deal that is not in their own interest. In the early days of the Common Market, there was a notion that all nations would work together and for their mutual benefit, summed up in the term communautaire. It’s not a word many use now.

And if the leaders cannot confidently and openly talk to each other and to their electorates about economics, they certainly can’t communicate any better about warfare. In an age of instant communication of non-negotiable positions, diplomacy starts on the back foot and on no foot at all if any parties are saying that they “will not talk to” any other parties. Politicians fear that they will seem weak unless they express certainty about the results of their actions and intransigent resolution towards the ‘aggressor’ or the ‘terrorist’. So the ‘defeat’ of your enemy becomes a yardstick by which your actions are to be judged, as if the sentiments that nurtured your enemy will mysteriously melt away when a few hot-headed guerrillas have been pushed back on the ground.

A shrewd judge of affairs in the Middle East, Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, likes to quote this saying: “the gentle art of saving face may yet destroy the human race”. Indeed, because politicians fear that subtlety and light and shade will read as weakness, hostages to fortune are offered in their declarations of intent. Which outbreak of hostilities over the last 50 years, one wonders, has concluded with a clear-cut situation, to which the self-styled good guys can point and say “look, everyone: the loss of life, the destruction of communities and the alienation of hitherto apolitical people was well worth it, completely justified by our handsome victory”?

Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan – elegant

Perhaps the least comprehensible aspect of the response that the world’s flashpoints produces from the secure, wealthy regimes of the north and west is the utter lack of imagination those regimes display towards relatively poor and deprived communities.

I have a modest proposal. We must give the United Nations actual power and that of course means power greater than that of any one member. The UN charter, still almost exactly as written in 1945, needs substantial revision. The permanent members of the Security Council must agree to surrender their veto, the prerogative of the bully over the powerless. No member can be allowed exemption.

The veto means that the UN has no muscle to flex against the US or China or the other elite nations. Which of them will volunteer to forego a veto? It would need a visionary party leader or presidential candidate to carry the case with his own electorate, so as to take a mandate to the other Security Council members; a diplomat of rare persuasive power, who implicitly understands the global gain of a truly powerful UN, to convert even one of the holders of the veto. But someone needs to attempt it. What is political power for if not to change the world? Meanwhile, the remit of the UN’s International Court of Justice needs to be widened so as not to depend on the consent of those states that are party to a dispute, another tough sell.

The UN should assume the power to order the immediate cessation of hostilities between member states. Waging war must be against the UN’s bedrock principles. Any member visiting warfare on another should be suspended forthwith from UN membership. In practice this must mean that all other member states, including those sympathetic to the miscreant’s cause, suspend all trade and other dealings with the suspended member. A blanket economic freeze would soon encourage a government to halt hostilities.

The UN must then have sufficient manpower and materiel to put immediate boots on the ground in overwhelming numbers in any and every land where hostilities break out, in order to impose and hold the peace. How can this be achieved? Simply by requiring every member nation to supply troops, weapons and supplies of an equal value to that which it spends on what it is pleased to call defence. Thus the US defence budget – $711bn in 2011 – would have to be precisely matched by its contribution to the UN’s peace-keeping budget. I suggest that it would not be long before nations saw that they got what we might call satisfyingly less bang for their buck if they cut their own defence budgets.

Netanyahu – gesture of good will

The UN must then have the resources to assume control of negotiation of a settlement between the disputatious nations. Warfare must be a gambit that is made impracticable because it makes each of the warring nations an international pariah. If both sides are taken out of benefit of UN membership, the issue of ‘blame’ is largely futile. The UN negotiators can then begin with a level playing field.

The UN should also have the power to intervene in a sovereign nation’s internal affairs or where there is civil strife (as currently in Syria) between a government and the population that is attempting to dislodge it. The UN’s remit should be truly global and part of that global interest would be the philosophy that instability in any nation is the concern of all nations. At present, for example, Syria’s neighbours are being obliged to cope with a vast influx of refugees. Matters such as the suppression of a particular tribal or religious grouping within a nation state might be confronted on a case-by-case basis. But the UN could hold sway over issues other than warfare. It could wield its power, no longer fettered by national vetoes, to impose restrictions on the activities that contribute so catastrophically to the destruction of the environment.

The recent hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians could have been brought to a quicker end or indeed pre-empted altogether if Ban Ki-moon had had the authority to land UN troops along the Israel-Gaza border. Instead, Ban toured the region’s seats of government pleading for restraint. Binyamin Netanyahu, to whom restraint is a foreign country, is widely accused of bombing Gaza not to stop Palestinian rockets falling (largely harmlessly) on Israel but to ensure his own re-election next year. Such calculations are only possible because Israel believes it needs to please none but its own people. A truly powerful UN would utterly transform the Middle East.

Ban – you, yes you do the dirty work

Barack Obama has indulged Israel with far less enthusiasm than any of his recent predecessors as president, but even he buys into the old saw that everything Israeli governments do is for the security of their own people. Nor does Obama recognise the State of Palestine as many nations now do. Obama would exercise the US veto if recognition of Palestine came before the Security Council. Of the other permanent Security Council members, China and Russia have recognised Palestine, France has not and the UK has offered conditional recognition.

American presidents traditionally declare their “love of freedom” and their desire to spread democracy throughout the world, but they are frequently less enthusiastic about nations being free to make their own choices, especially through the ballot box. The electorate of Palestine may exercise its democratic right to elect Hamas but democratic regimes do not love democracy and freedom so keenly that they recognize the democratically elected regime. “Don’t do what I do, do what I say” is the prerogative of the bully.

And it is this reinforcement of the planet’s power structure by the way that the UN is constituted that needs most urgently to be addressed. The UN could be a true force for good, the most powerful and constructive enterprise that man has ever devised. To bring that about needs leaders of rare courage and stamina. Where are they?

MORE THAN JUST a PET

Fargo our Great Dane died yesterday at the age of eleven years and exactly two months, a remarkable span for a giant breed. His likeness has been and will remain my on-line avatar. But the gap he leaves in our lives can never be filled. He was our first pet – we dutifully waited many years until we had the space and the routines to allow a dog to live with us happily.

I suspect that the vast majority of pet dogs (much more so than relatively self-sufficient cats) pass lives of unrelieved misery – bored, neglected and lonely. The central fact to understand about dogs is that they are pack animals. As soon as they join a household, they accept that they are in a pack, even if the pack consists of no more than a lap dog and an elderly housebound human. But dogs need to be in packs and so, if they are abandoned for hours on end by the rest of the pack, they become distressed, anxious, fearful, neurotic, destructive. How many dogs are made yet more miserable by being punished for expressing that misery?

Photograph: Barbra Flinder

Well, we gave Fargo a very happy life and he repaid us in full. We both work from home so were always around and, when he was two, we introduced a second dog into the pack, one too small to make any but a token challenge to Fargo’s status. The pair rubbed along pretty well and it meant that we could go out – though never for longer than three hours – and know they were company for each other.

Fargo was born in Wootton Bassett in the week of the 9/11 attacks. His kennels had military connections: the kennel name of his sire was Toscade Desert Storm, but happily his own name was the more benign Toscade Tigerfeet. Between first meeting him and then bringing him home, we decided to name him after a movie over which we both enthused. When we collected him, the breeder’s mother was there and she asked what we would call the dog. We told her. “Oh yes?” she asked. “Is that like Welsh Fargo?”

Though the runt of a litter of eleven, he grew into a ten-stone dog whose head loomed above mine when I (just below six feet) stood upright and he had his front paws on my shoulders. If I had £10 from everyone who jovially compared him with a horse, I should be very comfortably off.

When one keeps pets, one can easily become sentimental about them. My partner David and I dearly loved our two dogs, though not in anything like the way or to the degree that we love each other. I doubt that the dogs have loved us in any way or to any degree at all. That they are living on velvet they take for granted while having no sense of an alternative life.

They do not bite the hands that feed. They respond to physical contact but it is idle to imagine that licking or nuzzling is an earnest of anything so human as affection. In our moments when the mystic threatens to intrude, we like to pretend that there is something more profound than routine pet-keeping in the bonding between us and them. But the temptation to characterize a Great Dane as soulful, wise and a bit spiritual is strong. It’s also nonsense, of course. He was just an animal. But an unusually even-tempered one.

Photograph: Barbra Flinder

Dogs are perfectly capable of learning things, even relatively complex and sophisticated things. Fargo knew that the appearance of any kind of luggage meant that the pack was about to be deprived of a human member and he got depressed by this. I have watched him go up to a small travelling case, sniff it and then sit back on his haunches and emit a resounding sigh. One spring, we were leaving in a flurry of delay and panic to rush to Heathrow for a flight at some appalling hour on a Sunday morning and foolishly allowed Fargo to see the bags coming downstairs. He promptly threw back his head and howled. It pierced the heart of course. And it was impossible to inform him that the house-sitters (whom he adored) would be there by day-light.

Fed all his life on the BARF diet (bones and raw food – always uncooked bones, of course), Fargo maintained fitness and relative energy into old age, never remotely likely to suffer dysplasia and other joint and bone conditions common in big dogs. In his last months, though, arthritis set in and his legs began to fail him until he could barely stand. At this point, he made clear his desire for release by refusing food. What a boon it is that we are able to give our pets what they want and, thanks to the sensitive vet whom Fargo trusted from puppyhood, to do it so simply and with so little anxiety.

All his long life, it was his gentle and friendly disposition that endeared Fargo to everyone. When we first took him to obedience classes, a group of the women owners referred to him darkly as “the beast”. But they soon learned otherwise so that, when there were exercises that required us to swap dogs, there was always a clamour for Fargo’s leash.

He could tap into his lupine origins, however. On holiday in Cornwall, I was walking him off the lead through a sloping wood when he suddenly stiffened as he gazed ahead. There was a cow grazing on the track. It looked up, saw Fargo and, discretion being the better part of valour, carefully turned and started to head down through the trees. Fargo wasn’t having that. Of course, his running towards it made the cow run. And I already knew that I had no control over events. There were other cows further off. The cow that Fargo was pursuing turned and ran back. When it regained the track, it turned and galloped towards me. Fargo was now snapping at its heels, then going for its throat, tumbling under its hooves and, undaunted, pressing on.

I grabbed at Fargo’s collar as the pair thundered past but couldn’t hold him. The cow swerved uphill and then I saw that there were several more ahead, charging up through the trees. I gave chase but within moments all the animals were out of sight. The going was rough. I came across trampled barbed wire, then a cleft in the ground, about four feet deep, at the bottom of which was spattered blood. This was a nightmare. At last the trees abruptly ended and there was a huge grass field, breasting a steep hill. No cattle or dogs were in sight.

As I toiled up the hill, I suddenly saw horns rising on the horizon and then a cow, then several, then a large herd came ambling towards me. Soon they surrounded me, sniffing amiably. I asked if they had seen a Great Dane but they gave no answer.

Scanning the wooded area back below me, I spotted Fargo slinking through the trees. I yelled and whistled but he moved out of sight. I tramped back towards where I had seen him, then descended the long wooded slope. By the time I got back to the track, the light was going. I arranged two large branches in a cross shape on the track to indicate where I thought the herd and the dog had left it. Then I headed back to our rented cottage, calling Fargo’s name. As I got close to the cottage, I heard David’s voice: “he’s here”.

David had responded to a whining at the door and found the dog, muddy and covered in cuts and scratches. He had feared that something terrible had befallen me and was just setting out to find me when he heard my call. Fargo was none the worse for wear and no doubt feeling thrilled by his long chase. What he couldn’t know was that any farmer who had spotted him charging his herd would have been fully entitled to shoot him dead.

But most of the time, Fargo was as dignified and sedate as an old colonel relaxing at his club. With the breed’s characteristic habit of leaning gently into the legs of those they accept and his own particular curiosity to discover what everyone might have been eating by examining their mouths at close quarters, Fargo won over every human who met him, not least those hitherto indifferent to or even fearful of big dogs.

That he found the happy knack of looming without seeming in any way threatening may have been the secret of his unexpected charm. Whatever it was, he never failed to disarm. He was truly a poster-boy, both for the breed in particular and for dogdom in general. Our hearts ache.

I HAD it from MY FATHER

Today is the centenary of my father’s birth. And next January it will be fifteen years since his death. These anniversaries are of little moment to anyone but his two living close relatives: me (his only child) and his younger sister Maisie.

Still and all, his working life in many ways embodies the movement of western capitalism through the twentieth century and so I think his story is of wider interest. The more personal memories and anecdotes resonate only insofar as such stuff has parallels for any family and for other parent-child relationships.

Like anyone, Stan Gilbert began life with a mixture of advantages and disadvantages. His family circumstances were comfortable. His father was a prosperous businessman and the first in the town to own a car, for the driving of which he hired a chauffeur. There were other servants too. The tale was often told of the kitchen maid so innocent that, when she accompanied the family on an excursion to the seaside, she was astounded to discover that the sea was not – as she believed from the evidence of a landscape painting that hung in the house – “in a field”.

But Dad – as I learned for the first time from Auntie Maisie at the weekend – was “a seven-month baby”, born very small and yet to grow finger- or toenails. He needed weeks of constant nursing and – this I have known all my life – he was a martyr to asthma for the greater part of his childhood. As a result he missed a lot of school. I have always believed that my grandmother doted on Dad and perhaps rather smothered him. Auntie Maisie says that it was in particular their maternal grandmother, Granny Wicks, for whom the first grandchild could do no wrong.

At any rate, Dad lacked the basics of primary schooling and when his father proposed to despatch him to the local public school, even as a day pupil, the boy’s fear of the challenge of it all and his mother’s tearful entreaties saw off the threat. Instead, my father ended his education at fourteen and went into the business to learn it from the bottom up.

Between Dad and Maisie – apart from two girls who did not survive – was another son, Douglas (whimsically named after the motorcycle that brought news of the birth to his father at work). Doug was an altogether more confident and assertive character than Stan and his happy enrolment at the public school only underlined the differences. After school, he spurned the family business and trained to be an auctioneer.

The family view was that Dad always bore “an inferiority complex” especially in relation to his brother. There may have been something in this but, as a young man, Doug went through an extended ordeal that fundamentally altered his extrovert demeanour. Having joined the RAF and trained as a pilot well before Britain declared war on Hitler’s Germany, Doug was shot down in the first month of hostilities and was held prisoner for the entire duration. It was a six-year incarceration that he would never talk about subsequently, at least not to his keenly curious nephew.

Dad had a much less harrowing war. As a boot manufacturer, he was in a reserve occupation, so he was not called up early as Doug had been. What’s more, he was that much older: 26 when war broke out. Later he was inducted into the army, drove a truck (though in truth he was ever a dreadful driver) and took part in the Normandy landings. He rose to the rank of Sergeant-Instructor and, on the same day, received his demob papers and a transfer to the Far East. Given the choice, he gratefully came home.

That Dad was ill-educated was one of the wedges that came between him and me. I have always described him as a man who never read a book and it is almost the literal truth: I was certainly never given any grounds for believing that he read any of my own books. While he was at work six days a week through my childhood, my maternal grandfather (who lived with us) inevitably became a surrogate father, not least because I adored him and because his own passion for books and for history fed my own.

By the time I was born, Dad was running the boot and shoe factory that he had inherited from his own father (who died during my mother’s pregnancy). He would bring home the local accent that was the universal argot of his place of work. My mother, who had a degree of social aspiration and whose background was professional rather than industrial, hated it.

Packed off to the public school that my Dad had feared, I disdained this slovenly talk too. My Dad didn’t have the imagination to see that decreeing that I should get the education that he now regretted having missed (“it gives you confidence, boy”) would make me a different kind of person from him, just as being determined that I would be the first (and, as it’s turned out, the last) of the Gilberts to go to university would drive us further apart.

On this day 55 or so years ago, I gave Dad a slim paperback as a birthday gift. I still have it in the reference section of my study, yet unread. It is called Better English. It was only when I saw the crushed, rueful expression cross his face that I understood how the gesture I had made was cruel rather than helpful. Learning ways to bridge the gulf between us was a slow process.

My father had other traits that alienated me. He nurtured a parsimonious outlook that was of a piece with a staidness, a stick-in-the-mud-ness that no doubt spoke to his timid and anxious childhood. He never wanted the bother of doing anything so that it always fell to my mother to initiate an excursion, a family holiday or any kind of social activity. While she set about the heavy lifting, he grumbled on the sidelines – going shopping with him (which my mother had to do for anything other than household staples because he held the purse-strings) was a grim business. He hated paying out money and mourned the cash when it was gone.

I remember vividly the shaming experience of watching him carefully dole out the housekeeping money into my mother’s hand – licking his thumb and checking that there were never two notes inadvertently counted as one – with absolutely no sense of the humiliation that this ritual forced on his wife, something that I could certainly sense from a very young age.

Stan absolutely embodied the old line about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. His idea of a gift at birthdays and Christmas was a few notes folded and pushed into a brown envelope with my or Mum’s name scrawled on the front. He never gave to charity and denounced “scroungers” and “do-gooders”. Yet after the death of his uncle Wallace, he stormed around the house, furious that there was nothing for him in the will. In vain did my mother point out that the two men had never been close: indeed, I find it hard to recall an occasion when I ever met my great-uncle.

In revolt against my father’s anal attitude to money, I have always been notably careless with the stuff. I never know the price of anything, nor do I retain any notion of what anything cost me. I do not claim that my philosophy is in some way “healthier” than my father’s, but I have no doubt as to its origin.

In other ways, I have inherited variations of my father’s behaviour, usually to my great regret. In some eyes, Dad might well be accounted what his own generation would have called a “weak” character. He frequently used my grandfather’s age against him, particularly mocking his increasing deafness – “eh? eh?” he would bawl back in parody of Grandad’s plaintive but frequent response when addressed. He would scoff when the old man forgot to take his cap off in the house. These things seemed to me to be unkind, but I found myself cultivating my own strain of scorn to use against perceived weakness. I hope I have shed that.

Lacking dialectical skills, Dad would often resort to unforgivable tactics in family arguments, telling spectacular lies, making absurd claims and deploying naked emotional blackmail. He was adept at bringing my mother to tears of bitter frustration. Now and again, deep in some domestic tiff, I hear in my own lines of attack a weak but weird echo of my father’s outlandish gambits. I like to think that I immediately withdraw when that occurs.

In so many situations, my mother and I found ourselves allied against him and, though he and I both mellowed over the years, it was probably not until after my mother’s death in 1988 that I began to appreciate him more. But let me give him – or at least his genes – some credit for something that has filled my life with pleasure. Though neither of my parents was much given to listening to it (which their son does daily), they both related strongly to music.

My grandfather – the one who lived with us until his death at 87 when I was 14 – was a village schoolmaster and, for 40 years, ran a children’s choir. On a famous occasion, his meagre group reached the regional finals of a school choral competition and, trooping onto the stage in the wake of choirs that were dozens strong, were laughingly given no chance. In true Hollywood style, Grandpa’s choir won the trophy. That was long before I was born, but I vividly recall an occasion when, for my six or seven year-old benefit, this little old man stood in the corner of the dining room and sang for me with huge gusto some deathless Victorian ballad. I was moved to my core and wept buckets.

Also for 40 years, my Dad’s father was master of the silver band that did regular stints on the town’s bandstands. My parents met in the local amateur operatic society: she was in the dancing chorus, he took some roles. Though no actor, he had a decent light tenor voice and seemed not to suffer from his customary nerves when all he had to do was sing. You may imagine how often the story was told of how Dad came on for his solo at a concert party evening and my toddler voice piped up from the stalls: “It’s Daddy!”

Before my time, Dad scored a great success as Detlef, the fellow who leads the rousing ‘Drinking Song’, in Romberg’s The Student Prince. But he soon abandoned his amateur stage career. When the operatic society started to work through the canon of Rodgers & Hammerstein, Dad was invited to take the role of Mr Snow in Carousel. I was thrilled – ‘When the Children Are Asleep’ is a beautiful number and very grateful to the voice – but Dad declined, pleading pressure of work. Mum and I were utterly crestfallen.

Years later, Dad was persuaded to join the chorus for a neighbouring town’s revival of The Student Prince. Though he no longer led the chorus (and certainly didn’t pass for a student), he did an epic drunken reel across the stage in the middle of ‘The Drinking Song’ and I wondered if perhaps he was an actor after all. I was proud as Punch of him.

His other musical accomplishment was as a natural ballroom dancer, as smooth as silk on the floor and feather-light on his toes. All the ladies wanted to be his partner. I can picture the last time I saw him and Mum dancing – at a wedding, I think – and my eyes prickled then as they fill now. Perhaps that is why the movies of Fred Astaire still give me such joy.

As so often, it was adversity that brought the family more closely together and so I come to my Dad’s exemplary role in the unfolding of capitalism. Though my grandfather was wealthy, my great-grandfather was not, or at least not at the outset of his career. The chief activity of the town was the boot and shoe industry and, in my great-grandfather's day, it was very much a cottage industry. He and his wife set up a modest contribution to the shoe-making process in their own home. It was probably a clicking room: such kitchen-table operations were not unheard of when I was a boy.

But don't ask me what "clicking" was. The shoe trade, like any other, was bursting with a rich, arcane language all its own. As kids we used to enjoy the occasional sign outside shoe factories: "Skyvers wanted".

Footwear is a trade that does well out of war: army boots are in steady demand when there’s a call-up. Consequently, the Boer War, the Crimean War and the First World War successively saw boot manufacturing thrive. By the time that my grandfather and his brothers inherited my great-grandfather's business, it was highly successful.

At some point (I have never known when), the Gilbert family interest was bought out by a man named AJ Bignell. Certainly, although I always knew my father to be the managing director of the firm, I only knew the firm to be known as Bignell’s. Whether Dad was intended as MD I don’t know. But AJ Bignell’s only son died in the war-time bombing of the Café de Paris in London that famously also accounted for the cabaret performer Snake-hips Johnson: the event is lightly fictionalised in one of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time novels.

By my father’s account, Bignell stepped away from the business after his loss and became a recluse. Otherwise, Bignell’s did as well out of World War II as from the previous conflicts. And Dad steered it safely through most of the 1950s. But at some point, in what was seen as a move of some stealth, a controlling share in the company was acquired by a city speculator called Harry Jasper. Jasper & Co specialised in surreptitiously hoovering up modest but profitable concerns of all kinds. The change of ownership might never even have come to light had not a huge financial scandal broken when Jasper’s associate, Friedrich Grünwald, suddenly absconded to Israel with £3millions’ worth of the company assets.

The story raged for weeks on the finance pages of the newspapers and eventually Harry Jasper went to jail. Some of his companies were sold off but most, including Bignell’s, were closed down. In any case, the native boot and shoe industry was (to coin a phrase) on its uppers by this time, undermined by cheap Italian imports and soon to be destroyed by the switch from traditional leather shoes to trainers and other synthetic products. To Dad fell the melancholy task of making all his employees redundant, clearing and closing up the factory for the last time and, for one week only, drawing the dole. He was 50.

The second week after the closure of Bignell’s, with some crucial assistance from generous friends and from drawing on 35 years’ worth of trade contacts, Dad opened a little shop: Stan Gilbert (Footwear) Ltd.

It was hard going. Footwear being the county trade, everyone for miles around had a family member who could get hold of free or at least cut-price shoes. My mother and I (then a teenager) worked long hours to help without pay or indeed thanks (Dad didn’t do gratitude). But by degrees and shrewd use of his contacts, Dad made it pay and survive for twenty years. It helped a lot that, though a narrow, unimaginative and prosaic man, he was transformed into a poet with a well-made shoe in his hands. The first pair that I owned as a child was wholly fashioned by him, by hand, from scratch. I still have the lasts on which he made them.

You couldn’t contemplate starting such an enterprise now. Retail has no spare capacity for the little man and customers no longer comprehend a shop that does one thing and does it well. It wouldn’t occur to many to go to a shoe shop (where there would be a choice) for (say) shoelaces when you can no doubt pick up a standard pair at the supermarket.

Like most of us, Dad was utterly a creature of his time. A mass of prejudices (especially against the Welsh and the Jews), he was utterly uncomprehending of what women might want. I think he had been something of a hound in his youth. Once at a social gathering, he and my mother spoke to a couple whom they seemed to know a little and, watching carefully, I gradually saw that there was history between Dad and the blowsy woman in the couple. Dad said enough afterwards to allow me to surmise that he and she had had a premarital fling long ago.

One Christmas, back in the days when I and my partner each still went to stay with our respective parents for the season, I opened a thoughtful gift from a woman friend. It was Charles Silverstein and Edmund White’s book The Joy of Gay Sex. Happily, I was “out” to my parents by then and so was able to carry off the moment. Later, I came across my Dad curiously leafing through the book. He reacted squeamishly to a line illustration that turned out to be of an act of fellatio. “Did no one ever do that to you?” I asked carefully. Dad pondered. “Yes” he said. “A woman in Italy during the war. But I couldn’t do it”. This calm confession of faithlessness – my parents married in 1940 – quite astonished me.

My mother’s death knocked my father for a loop. His plan had always been to leave her comfortably off. Being widowed had never entered his mind. He cared for her gallantly during her fading months, learning a few cookery skills from scratch. When he was alone he was miserable and, to no one’s surprise, married again within eighteen months. His new wife was very different from my mother but she made him ridiculously happy.

In January 1998, Dad was hurrying Peggy across a main road with a typical show of impatience. They were hit by a car. It was a risky place to cross but the car was certainly speeding. My father died instantly. Peggy was in hospital for a few weeks but recovered. In an absurd piece of poetry, the driver turned out to be the music master from my old school. Had my Dad actually enrolled there, the man’s distant predecessor might well have cultivated Dad’s musical bent and led him along a different path. Who knows? At any rate, for causing a fatality by speeding, he was fined £120.

Near the end of his life, his solicitor asked Dad what he was worth and he essayed a figure that would certainly have permitted the holiday that he refused to sanction during their eight years of marriage. In fact he left five times as much as he thought, founded on the shrewd investments of his father. This inheritance allowed Peggy to live without worry until Alzheimer’s kicked in two or three years ago and allowed my partner and I to buy the property we adore in the west country. In his fear of ever suffering financial embarrassment, Dad amassed a small but idle fortune. It seems hard on his two wives that they should have had to observe constant thrift. Lucky for me, though.

RACE to the FINISH

This time next week, give or take a hanging chad or a tropical storm, we should know whether Barack Obama is to be a two-term or a one-term president. That the electoral outcome could be in doubt has only really been a matter of moment since the first television debate between the two major candidates (I think we can safely discount the possibility that Roseanne Barr, the Peace and Freedom Party candidate, will be the 45th occupant of the Oval Office).

It says a lot about the tenor of American politics and its relationship with television that Mitt Romney’s campaign, hitherto universally scorned as the most inept in the modern era, could be turned around simply because he was able to trot through three debates without perpetrating a major gaffe and because the incumbent was perceived to be relatively subdued in the first of the encounters. Such a low threshold of credibility hardly suggests that the American electorate is either very thoughtful or very far-sighted.

Moreover, one might imagine that sufficient numbers of snake-oil salesmen have run for public office in the US for the voters to be leary of broad and uncosted promises. Yet no presidential candidate since Richard Nixon has been more ready to say anything to get elected than Mitt Romney. Can any member of the Republican team say, hand on heart, that they know for a certainty what is Romney’s definitive position on any issue of the day?

Mitt's tax affairs remain a mystery

This readiness to embrace an implausible candidate who reckons to carry the right-wing banner is a peculiarly American trait. Just as the twice-elected George W Bush was at best a joke and in general an inadequate to the rest of the world, so Obama remains held in high esteem everywhere except in the States. Under a Republican chief executive, disobliging remarks about his character and record are held to be un-American. Yet the most vituperative abuse is poured onto Obama’s head by Tea Party adherents and others. This says a lot about innate attitudes in America. Indeed, it is absurdly difficult to overestimate the unblushing conservatism of a huge proportion of the American populace.

In a posting earlier this year – The Elephant is Still in the Room (March 12th) – I explained why I feared that Obama’s declaration that he would ask the rich to contribute “just a little bit more” to the economy was something that might deny him re-election. I still don’t discount that but I detect a more potent swell against the incumbent. And I am sorry to say that I believe it is the race issue.

Those attacks on Obama that are meant to be abusive and damaging are really addressed to the notion of his legitimacy as an American. And even after four years of him leading and representing the American people on the world stage – certainly with no less dignity or distinction than any of his predecessors – these nay-sayers have revived the attacks with even greater venom. There are three prongs to these absurd claims: that he is “secretly” a Muslim, that he is nakedly a Socialist and that he was not born in Hawaii as his birth certificate clearly states.

Dog-lovers have never forgiven Mitt for driving hundreds of miles with the family dog in a cage lashed to the car roof

From Donald Trump upwards, people of malicious intent and clinical stubbornness insist that, despite a total lack of any corroborating evidence, all these assertions are true. Outside the States, there are millions who – unlike the Americans – have actually lived under Muslim or Socialist governments and who therefore can recognise the genuine article. Show me anyone in the world outside the Republican-Tea Party nexus in the States who sincerely reckons that Obama is either a Muslim or a Socialist.

But of course Obama is an “outsider”, not a “proper” American so it stands to reason that he would be trying to impose “foreign” notions on the upstanding Americans: QED. The whole cockamamie stance speaks to the real objection to Obama, the racial objection. A few weeks ago, a Florida woman gave her vox pop view to a BBC reporter. Mitt Romney she declared “has more experience. And more class”. You can hear precisely what she means underneath those words: “why, Mr Romney is white”.

A placard sometimes seen at Romney rallies yells: “Put the white back in the White House”. It would be encouraging if the Republican stewards told the bearers to take these down but they don’t. As with every other issue, Mitt Romney has played fast and loose with the race card. Would he support the implementation of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (the DREAM Act), a federal measure designed to admit to citizenship those integrated children whose parents brought them to the US without proper documentation? Romney has said yes, no and partly. Then Romney has floated the elusive notion of “self-deportation”, a technique that is theoretically voluntary, yet you just know that its implementation would be accompanied by techniques designed to impel the inadequately documented to leave.

Having no foreign policies of his own, Mitt is apt to echo Barack's

Voting in Arizona will be watched with particular interest in connection with this matter. The state’s immigration law is bitterly resented by the Hispanic community and its chief architect was recruited to be a Romney advisor. Arizona has been safely in the Republican camp since favourite-son Barry Goldwater’s run for president in 1964. But lately, against the trend, Obama has been eating into Romney’s lead there. Instead of being marked as “Republican” in the forecasting graphics, Arizona is now counted, in the jargon, “leaning Republican”. That may have great significance, not just for this election but for future political developments.

As it happens, Romney has immigration issues in his own family. Though his myriad sons have all-American names like Biff, Jerk and Schlong rather than Dai, Rhys and Gwrddywal, Romney is married to a woman whose parents came from Wales. What’s more, Ann Romney’s father was fiercely opposed all his life to supernatural superstition and was shamefully baptised into the Mormon church by his children within days of his death in 1992. He’d have been incandescent with rage to be dragooned into what he termed “hogwash”. For his children, this must have looked like the DREAM solution.

One of the most heartening aspects of the 2008 election was the way Obama’s candidature galvanised non-whites. Hundreds of thousands – maybe millions – of citizens who had never voted before, because they felt disenfranchised by a WASP establishment, found themselves queuing round the block to vote for a black presidential candidate. Well, you might say, those people will vote again and so he’ll be safely returned. But will they vote?

A big issue for Obama's second term will be the USA's response to the economic power of China

For many, I surmise, nothing much has been changed by four years of Obama. The president has very properly governed on behalf of all the citizenry and so, in the longest recession in living memory, few of those who already didn’t have much have added to their store. Many of them will not be motivated to vote as they were four years ago and many of them will reason that they made their great gesture then and they don’t need to repeat it. The glass ceiling has been broken and, had he not ruled himself out by self-inflicted damage, Herman Cain might have been the Republican candidate.

The Democrats have several causes for hope, however. One is the streamlined organisation on the ground that got the vote out so overwhelmingly last time. Re-election as an operation has been planned and fine-tuned ceaselessly for at least two years, a time during which the Republicans have frequently been all over the place. Another is that incumbency is certainly an advantage. Those presidents who failed to be re-elected – Ford, Carter, Bush Sr – were held in low esteem by their own parties, let alone their opponents, and the rival candidates in each case offered a credible new start. And Hurricane Sandy has been as good an “October surprise” as any incumbent could wish, allowing him to be and to appear responsive and decisive: at any rate, the storm is certainly not about to cost Obama any votes, unless he fumbles something in this last week of campaigning.

Opinion poll trackers like The New York Times and The Huffington Post have never shown any serious doubt that Obama would prevail. But opinion pollsters can be very wrong: as I frequently remind my readers, I was unable to stay up for the 2004 elections and retired to bed with Bob Worcester’s confident “calling it” for John Kerry ringing in my ears. So I do genuinely fear that the unprincipled puppet may yet make it to the White House, buoyed by the unspoken racism of vast tracts of the supposedly god-fearing electorate. But I cling to the audacity of hope.

LOSS of POWER

The faintly ludicrous figure of Norman Lamont, these days known as Baron Lamont of Lerwick, does not swim into my consciousness very often. When he does, it is as likely as not in the context of Julian Clary’s notorious and outrageous joke at his expense. Otherwise, there was the debonair dismissal of political misfortune – “je ne regrette rien” – and the somewhat enigmatic story of his letting a flat to a Miss Whiplash. Oh, and there was Black Wednesday.

It’s another quote from John Mayor’s Chancellor that occurs to me now, the most quoted line from his resignation speech to the Commons after he had been offered a demotion that he found insulting. Lamont described Major as “giving the impression of being in office but not in power”. It was one of those “ouch” moments that the House relishes forever afterwards.

Lamont and Major back in the day

The coalition is having a lamentable – or, if you prefer, a lamontable – year that just seems to get worse. And some of the damage begins to look irreparable, particularly that self-inflicted by David Cameron himself. He is being increasingly seen – in his own party quite as much as outside it – as inept. At Prime Minister’s Questions, Ed Miliband has found how to get under his skin and – what Cameron maybe does not realise – it shows in the PM’s heightened colour, barely concealed anger and tendency to bluster. Moreover, Cameron’s notorious impatience with detail and procedure is dangerously prompting him to make policy on the hoof, as in his remarks about energy that were news to the department charged with that rather important subject.

The PM of the red face

The Andrew Mitchell debacle – inevitably dubbed Plebgate – has done far-reaching damage, not least in allowing Tory backbenchers a month largely free of being kept in line by the whips. Cameron ought to have been able to see at once that Mitchell’s authority – the only quality that a chief whip really needs – had been fatally undermined by the man’s inability to mount a coherent and convincing account of the exchange with the Downing Street police officer. When a party leader’s instincts – in this case to tough it out – leave him stuck in a corner, the followers inevitably begin to wonder if the game is up.

What with Boris Johnson capering merrily in the wings and the certainty that the coalition parties will be brushed aside in the imminent by-election in Tory marginal Corby, Cameron indeed starts to give the impression of being in office but not in power. I suspect that it is many weeks since Downing Street discounted the potential appeal of Ed Miliband under the scrutiny of a general election; even Fleet Street has reluctantly begun to acknowledge that Miliband has been playing it very long and very shrewd.

Ed Miliband projects

But my sense of it is that, although his backbenchers are palpably growing more critical if not openly mutinous, encouraged by such insider savagery as Lord Tebbitt directed at the government this weekend, Cameron’s main worry for the prospects both before and after the election concerns the Liberal Democrats.

Consider the bind in which Nick Clegg finds himself. What can he and his party offer at the 2015 general election? That they ameliorated the grosser effects of the Tories? Who will swallow that? That they achieved some of their cherished long-term aims? Which were those? That they surrendered their independence in the national interest and made common cause with the hated Tories to save the economy? Figures to be released this week may suggest that the longest double-dip recession Britain has ever experienced – which, moreover, only began on the coalition’s watch – is coming to an end, but who can believe that any but the richest voters will go to the polls next time with a good feeling about their own finances?

The reality is that, even if the statistics can be massaged to look promising, the broad mass of the electorate will still be hurting and will still not believe that “we are all in it together” in the risibly untrue phrase that the fare-diddling Chancellor had the gall to dredge up again in conference. What’s more, the Tories will be fighting the Lib Dems for every vote. Tory backbenchers will heap all perceived unpopularity onto the coalition’s “weak sister”.

Andrew Mitchell leaves office

Of the Lib Dems’ 57 seats, 28 (virtually half) are held with majorities below 5,000 votes, all of which must be feeling vulnerable. Don’t expect Sarah Teather, John Hemming, Jo Swinson, Chris Huhne or even that old warhorse Sir Alan Beith to return at the next election.

Nine Lib Dems have majorities above 10,000, which might be thought to be relatively safe. Interestingly, all the past leaders still in the Commons number among those nine – Paddy Ashdown, Charles Kennedy, Sir Menzies Campbell – along with the present leader, Nick Clegg, and the mooted future leader, Vince Cable. But you wouldn’t want to put folding money on Clegg retaining his Sheffield Hallam seat, especially as students have long been moving into the area in order to punish him over tuition fees.

But the support for the Lib Dems as measured by opinion polls is so low and so half-hearted that they will be lucky even to retain eight of the nine purportedly “safest”. I habitually discount the “evidence” of those pseudo-scientists the pollsters, but I confidently predict (based simply on what my waters tell me) that the Lib Dem candidate in Corby will be beaten by both the Green and the UKIP candidates and consequently will lose her deposit. She may even be overtaken by the anti-wind-farms independent (the journalist and prize ass James Delingpole) and by the Monster Raving Loony Party representative, a Mr Toby Jug.

Nick Clegg: things can only get ... um ...

Contemplating annihilation, the Lib Dems surely must be considering their options. A number of statements lately by Clegg and others – statements, mind; not actions – tend to suggest that the Lib Dems are beginning to see the need to let light become visible between them and their coalition partners. But surely something more dramatic and far-reaching is required.

If I were Clegg, I would be looking as a matter of urgency for the issue on which I could credibly and creditably lead my party out of power. To do so would certainly bring down the government. Cameron would have no choice but to try and soldier on with a minority administration. Labour, promptly unveiling its hitherto mysterious plan for government, would take the first opportunity to seek a vote of confidence, which the Tories would lose. Then Clegg could fight a general election not as the ineffectual junior partner of a reviled and blundering coalition but as the leader who had the “courage” to bring down the coalition on “a point of principle”. Believe me, it’s the only scenario that will save his party from electoral annihilation.

Elsewhere in the wild wood that is coalition government, some of the forest creatures lollop along as if without a care in the world. Here’s a story that reveals more about the Tory hegemony than might appear on the surface. That egregious twit Jeremy Hunt was recently present at a Buckingham Palace reception, clearly still basking in the Olympic glow that he erroneously believes may redeem his disgraceful stint as Secretary of State for Media, Culture & Sport. When he and the monarch duly came to face to face, little Hunt was ready with his anecdote, delivered, we may be certain, with all the toe-curling brightness of a shiny-faced Vth-former.

Jeremy Hunt: please like me

He related how a Japanese diplomat had assured him that the Emperor would never have been so game and public-spirited as to (pretend to) leap from a helicopter for the entertainment of the viewers of the Olympiad ceremony. The Queen, who obviously would have immediately tuned him out on the words “Japanese diplomat”, shrugged and moved on (the authenticity of this story is underlined by how absolutely convincing the account of the monarch’s demeanour contrives to be).

Hunt had barely begun to choke back his gush when the Duke loomed over him and barked “who are you?” How we all wish we had been eye-witnesses to this double whammy of vertiginous rebuffs. But really: if the public school millionaires in the cabinet don’t know how to make small talk with royalty, what earthly use are they?